Erlking- Germanic SpiritSpirit"King of the Elves"

Sir Oluf

The Erlking begins in Denmark. The ballad "Elveskud," preserved in Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, tells of Sir Oluf, who rides out to invite guests to his wedding and encounters elf-maidens dancing in the moonlight. The elf-king's daughter asks him to dance and offers rich gifts. Oluf refuses. He is to be married in the morning.

The elf-maiden does not ask again. She strikes him with illness. Oluf rides home and tells his mother to make his bed. She hides his condition, but at dawn his bride lifts the scarlet cloth and finds a corpse. She dies of grief. Three bodies go to the churchyard instead of a wedding procession.

The Mistranslation

In 1778, Johann Gottfried Herder translated "Elveskud" into German for his folk-song collection Stimmen der Völker in Liedern. The Danish "ellerkonge" or "elverkonge" meant "elf-king," from elver, elves. Herder read "eller" as Erle, the German word for alder. The elf-king became the Erlkönig, the alder-king, a figure no longer bound to the elves of Scandinavian belief but to the eerie alder groves that grow in marshland between water and solid ground.

The mistake proved more powerful than the original. The Erlkönig took on a life entirely its own.

The Ride Through the Night

Goethe wrote his "Erlkönig" in 1782 as part of the Singspiel Die Fischerin, and it became one of the most famous poems in the German language. A father rides through the night with his sick child. The child sees the Erlking. The father does not.

The Erlking calls to the boy with seductive promises: beautiful games, many-colored flowers on the shore, golden robes worn by his daughters. The father tells the child it is only mist, only willows, only old gray shadows. But the Erlking's offers become demands. "Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; und bist du nicht willig, so brauch' ich Gewalt." I love you, your beautiful form excites me; and if you're not willing, I'll use force.

The child screams. The father spurs his horse. He reaches the courtyard at last and looks down. The child in his arms is dead.

Every apparition has a naturalistic explanation. The crown is a streak of mist. The daughters are old willows in the gray. The whispered promises are wind in dry leaves. The poem never tells us whether the Erlking was real or whether the child was hallucinating from fever. It does not need to.

The Song

Franz Schubert set Goethe's poem to music in 1815, when he was eighteen. A single singer voices four characters: narrator, father, child, and Erlking. The piano drives relentless triplet octaves underneath, the sound of hoofbeats that never slow. The Erlking sings in sweet, lilting, major-key melodies. The child's cries rise higher with each encounter. The father's low responses grow increasingly strained. Then the hoofbeats stop. Two words in the sudden silence: "war tot."